Radio Tomorrow with James Cridland

Podcasting and online radio is all very well - but, as anyone will tell you, the numbers are small. More than that - it’s hard to get people to find your show, too. It’s rather easier to get people to listen to you if you’re on the radio.

If you want to play music, it gets harder still. You can’t play music in podcasts (well, full music tracks that anyone’s heard of), so the only real way to play an hour’s worth of music that you...

Last week, during the holidays, I did a lot of driving. It turns out that Australia, my home country, is quite big: and a trip from Melbourne to Orbost, which looks tiny on the map, is actually four and a half hours.

I’d claim that I listened to a lot of radio while I was driving that distance; but my four year-old wouldn’t hear of it, and so I was “treated” to the entire available work of My Little Pony on...

Run by Apple and available exclusively on Apple Music, Beats 1 was launched at the end of June 2015 - most audaciously, grabbing presenter Zane Lowe from BBC Radio 1 at the time.

The programming is good, and high quality. It's great to see Apple invest in radio - and invest they have, with three great-looking studios in LA, New York and London; and some great broadcasters. However...

I write this having attended Radiodays Europe for the past few days. It’s a big radio conference - the biggest in the world, in fact, with 1,500 people going there.

The conference rotates country in Europe: this year it was in Amsterdam in The Netherlands, next year it’ll be in Vienna, Austria. Four tracks of well-produced content always leads to some interesting thoughts, and a difficult...

I do quite a lot of award judging. I'd recommend it. It's quite a useful thing to do - it forces you to listen to things you'd otherwise not listen to, and you get a good, whirlwind, view of a particular sector or market than you'd otherwise not have got.

It's particularly interesting for me, since I don't make radio. I've not been on the air for ten years (though I'd love to again);...

Jump into a brand new Volkswagen, or Skoda, and you’ll notice the radio - part of the “VW Infotainment” in car option.

There’s a lot to like. For a start, there’s a big button marked ‘radio’ on the dashboard. Surprisingly, these buttons are disappearing in some cars, in spite of radio being the most-used audio source in the car.

The way we make radio is changing. My first job in radio was carrying a heavy Uher tape recorder to an interview for a news reporter - we needed specialist equipment then, costing hundreds or even thousands. Today, we’ve most of the equipment already. But you still probably need a decent microphone.

The Shure MV51 is an old-fashioned looking large-diaphragm microphone, but it is anything...

The UK’s commercial radio industry is about to get probably the biggest shakeup of its life.

Commercial radio in the UK is comparatively new - it only started in 1973. Until then, the country had four national radio stations provided by the BBC - a part-time top40 station that launched in 1967 (Radio 1), a more adult light music station (Radio 2), classical music on Radio 3 and news and drama on...